It's the Network …

The Electoral Palatinate was by all accounts a particularly unstable region of the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Located on the Empire's western boundary, the region was devastated in the Thirty-Years War. This included the exile of Calvinist Elector Frederick V in 1623 and his replacement with the Catholic Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria. It was not until 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia that Frederick's son, the Reformed Elector Karl Ludwig I, returned to preside over the lower part of a divided Palatinate that had ceded its northern territory to the Bavarian Duke. Karl Ludwig I was faced with the enormous challenge of rebuilding the Palatinate and bringing it prosperity, but constant pressure from French armies under Louis XIV to extend their domain eastward to the Rhine rendered this task nearly impossible, even with the return of Catholic rule through Karl Ludwig's successors in 1685.

Caspar Wistar, the subject of Rosalind Beiler's Immigrant and Entrepreneur, entered the world in 1696 as the son of a low-ranking government official who served as "forester" of a small area immediately to the south and east of Heidelberg. Wistar was born just as the War of the Palatinate was ending, but not before many of its citizens had already left in search of more auspicious circumstances. Unlike these refugees, however, Wistar's father chose to remain in the homeland even as the War of Spanish Succession (1701–16) kept the region mired in conflict throughout his son's early life.

Wistar did not follow in his father's footsteps, but rather joined one of the earlier waves of immigrants to colonial Pennsylvania. Though by no means the first German to be drawn to the New World by the promises held the province's out by the proprietor William Penn, the twenty-one-year-old still stepped onto the docks of the fledgling port of Philadelphia in 1717 at a time when its German immigrant community was in the formative stages. He arrived both jobless and in debt from the long trans-Atlantic journey, with acquaintances from the voyage his only apparent social contacts. From these humble beginnings, however, Wistar was able to advance socially, gaining the trust and respect of religious, political, and entrepreneurial Quaker leaders in less than a decade. And over the ten years that followed, Wistar established himself as both a wealthy landowner and influential leader of the German community that had sprung up around him. In the fifteen years before his death in 1752, Wistar had even successfully petitioned the New Jersey legislature to form the United Glass Company, the first of its kind in North America, earning the nearly universal praise of Benjamin Franklin and other colonial innovators and leaders.

How did Caspar Wistar accomplish these feats? Professor Beiler contends he was able to do them because he did not arrive in the colonies as poor as it may appear on the surface. Poor in terms of monetary wealth surely, but rich in forms of intangible human capital that he had developed through his early experiences in the Palatinate. As an economist, I find this an intriguing proposition.

To understand Beiler's hypothesis, it is necessary to understand the kind of life that citizens led in the forests near Heidelberg in the late seventeenth century. Thus the first half of the book builds a sketch of what Wistar's early life must have been like. It was certainly one in which the government played a powerful role in resource allocations. Wistar's father and grandfather were hunter/foresters, not so much in the modern sense of individuals who seek wild game for personal subsistence or sport, but rather as government employees charged with restricting the use of the region's natural resources to ensure that its bounty would benefit the current Elector and his entourage. This made Wistar's ancestors more akin to forest rangers and...